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How the death penalty has been administered in the United States, from British GQ

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John Zemblidge, right, of Phoenix, leads a group of about a dozen death penalty opponents in prayer as the protest the possible execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood at the state prison in Florence, Ariz. on Wednesday, July 23, 2014. Arizona's highest court on Wednesday temporarily halted the execution of the condemned inmate so it could consider a last-minute appeal. The Arizona Supreme Court said it would consider whether he received inadequate legal representation at his sentencing. The appeal also challenges the secrecy of the lethal injection process and the drugs that are used.
(AP Photo)

Writer Alex Hannaford details how government executions have been carried out in the United States in his article for British GQ in the magazine's August edition.

The article may have been prompted by the three botched executions that have taken place in the country over the last six months. Hannaford explains the fight state governments face over securing the proper execution drugs.

For most of the 20th century, states administered the death penalty using the electric chair. But starting in the 1980s, lethal injection became the preferred method of execution, according to Hannaford.

"In 1999, photographs of the botched electrocution of Allen Lee Davis on Florida's death row were published by a judge on the state's supreme court. In the pictures, Davis can be seen purple-faced, eyes scrunched shut, blood pouring from his nose and dripping onto his prison whites. The sickening spectacle drew nationwide media attention and an end to Florida's use of the electric chair," he writes.

Since 2009, the safest forms of execution drugs have been difficult for states to acquire. A key producer in North Carolina stopped making one of the drugs. Human rights groups and defense attorneys have also used media campaigns and lawsuits to shut down other supply chains, according to Hannaford.

For example, pentobarbital is the drug Louisiana would like to use in its executions, but the state has not been able to buy it for several months. In January, Louisiana corrections officials amended the state's death penalty protocol to allow other drugs to be used in state executions.

Hannaford explains why pentobarbital might be hard to find in the following passage:

"Lundbeck, a Danish pharmaceutical company, held the only licence to manufacture pentobarbital, known by its trade name Nembutal in the United States, and by July 2011, caving to pressure from human-rights groups, it agreed to halt distribution of the product to prisons in any state that carried out the lethal injection," he wrote.